Getting a handle on the philosophical doctrine of materialism is key to understanding the sharp divergence of society today from the Judeo-Christian founding principles of our nation. Socialist sects, from American liberalism to Lenin’s Soviet Union, reject God and look to the material structure of government to solve all problems.
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Emails from readers and comments posted on The View From 1776 website suggest that philosophical materialism is not a widely understood concept.
The word materialism suggests to most people an obsession with money and consumer items - high-priced automobiles, McMansions, the latest gadgets, exotic vacations, and so forth.
As used in The View From 1776, however, the term materialism refers to the philosophical doctrine that rose to dominate Western civilization in the 19th century.
Philosophical materialism is opposed to spirituality. It is the rejection of God, spiritual religion, and the idea of eternal moral truth.
Materialism means that the only reality, the only causes for what goes on in the world, are physical things and forces that can be detected by the human senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Liberal-socialists call this scientific. Everything else, such as religion and moral codes, is dismissed as ignorant superstition from a pre-scientific age.
Thus there is no God, no human soul, no spiritual dimension to life. Individual humans are adrift in the cosmos, at the mercy of external, material forces, from which they can be saved only by the superior knowledge and brain-power of liberal-socialist intellectuals.
An example may make the idea clearer.
In the Biblical philosophy of history, the existence of the people of Israel is understood as the unfolding of God’s will in the world, through his chosen people, living under the Mosaic covenant and the various other covenants that followed. Christianity, God’s final covenant through Jesus Christ, is a further unfolding and illumination of God’s spiritual will, spreading beyond the people of Israel and into the whole world. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Christianity became the foundation and essence of Western civilization and was the shared spiritual bond for all of Western Europe, until the 19th century.
In the 19th century, Karl Marx, himself a Jew, rejected the special status of the people of Israel and the whole Biblical tradition, declaring that religion was the opium of the masses, concocted by the ruling classes to oppress the workers. People living in political society, according to Marx, are the product exclusively of the earthly material conditions in which they work and live, and of the government that rules them. Marx and other socialists essentially ignore the spiritual dimension of human existence in political society.
From this Marxian understanding came the view of human nature as clay in the hands of the socialist intellectuals to be molded into perfect shape, creating a utopian world of peace and social justice. It was the genesis of Lenin’s expectation of transforming human beings into the New Soviet Man. It is the impetus for liberals’ unflagging faith in the welfare state.
Liberals and other socialists believe that the material structure of political society determines the nature and conduct of citizens. This means that there is no such thing as eternal moral truth. The Ten Commandments are just another set of rules that can be banned from public life and altered at will by the political rulers in order to reshape the conduct of citizens. This view underlies the present-day schism within Protestant denominations like the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches and the United Church of Christ, whose leaders ignore the Bible and make up their own religious doctrine, falsely calling it Christianity.
Propaganda, a materialistic force, is used to manipulate public opinion, which becomes the final arbiter of right and wrong. That is the role of the New York Times, PBS, NPR, and teachers’ unions promoting multi-cultural and PC education.
The Darwinian hypothesis of evolution was a contemporary of Marxian socialism. An important materialistic implication of Darwinian evolutionary doctrine is that, there being no spiritual, intelligent design in the world, everything, including standards of personal conduct, is continually evolving under the impact of materialistic forces.
In the materialistic legal theory of liberalism, our Constitution is described as a “living” document that is amended daily via the latest fads of public opinion, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, or embryonic stem cell research. As practiced by the courts, this is judicial activism, with judges assuming the prerogative of the legislature to interpret public opinion and thereby amend the Constitution by discovering previously unsuspected, hidden rights to hedonistic self-absorption.
Truth, as socialist Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, is whatever wins out in the market place, which effectively means that whoever controls the propaganda media defines morality. Hence the rise, since the ill-named Age of Enlightenment, of moral relativism.
Human nature, in the materialistic thesis, can be shaped to fit the aims of the political state by regulations and progressive education. State-planners are believed capable of restructuring political societies to impose social justice (equality of income) and eliminate crime and war.
Individuals, preoccupied with hedonistic indulgence in drugs, alcohol, and sexual promiscuity, fancy themselves to be enjoying the ultimate degree of freedom. In reality they have become addicted to a hedonistic opium of the masses, potentially used by the ruling elite, as in the Soviet Union, to create totalitarian rule.
In such a materialistic world, there are no fixed principles of civility or morality, no sin, indeed ultimately no civilization.
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